The State of The Car

[f6fhellcat13]

I'm sorry, but all this silly green malarkey has gotten up my nose. If I can afford it I want a big V8 with a big exhaust. I want people to choke on my exhaust gases and to get scared when they hear me coming, not go to work on a comunistical bycicle saving the planet because oh look at me how trendy and cool I am.

Mmmm I feel much better now, I needed to get it off my chest.

It really grinds my goat when I see people complaining about environmental regulations or bragging about the damage they've done to the environment.

It's myopic, childish, and selfish to assume that governments and people are becoming more unfriendly to cars just because they don't want us, an insignificant group of the population, to have fun. Whether or not you think climate change is a thing, visit any populated area and see the horrible shit man gets up to when he's given carte blanche on a piece of land; it is quite obvious that humans can have an effect on their environment and very often a negative one. When I'm home, there's a freeway I often drive on from which I've seen the ocean maybe ten or twenty times through the haze. This is a freeway I took to school and back every day for four years plus trips to friends' houses on weekends. This shouldn't be.

Sure, it's annoying that the car seems to be the scapegoat for these types, a pariah in a world full of pollution, but just because they are wrong about the breakdown of pollution sources does not mean their underlying point is. It would be nice if that wasn't the case, but that's true for a lot of things.

While there are plenty of self-righteous assholes who give environmental consciousness a bad name, there are also the equally-annoying twats in Rams with stacks and a fetish for black smoke (Edit: or overly-aggressive drivers in sportscars who give us gearheads a bad name). Making an analogy to cars, we still like BMWs, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis etc... despite the fact that a significant plurality of their drivers are unpleasant. Focus on the song not the singer.

Perhaps, as I child of the '90s, I've been brainwashed by all the "green" pop culture that began to emerge back then, but I would like to think that I've reached these ideas of my own accord. I have never really gotten the wanton opulence and waste that so many seem to pursue. I'm not saying that people shouldn't waste, excesses are fun, I'm just saying that they should have to pay accordingly.

People talk about the imminent horsepower crash like it's the end of driving fun. You don't need a 3,000,000 bhpz 65 ton car to have fun and I actually think that the inevitable downsizing (of cars, not engines) will be a good thing. As Da Vinci said when paraphrasing my old sig, "simplicity is sophistication" and shouldn't be so universally disregarded as low-tech.

I've lost my train of thought, so I think I'm going to end this here, so discuss...

Besides, our vitriol should be direct at safety standards, anyway... Or, at the very least in this particular instance, the cult of celebrity.